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In the essay, ‘Necropolitics’, Achille Mbembe attends to the contemporary subjugation of life to the power of death – exceptional violence that exceeds the biopolitical aim of fostering life – thus...

This article attends to the instrumentalization of gender and sexuality in recent Polish political campaigns. Locating current political debates in a cultural-historical context of long-established hierarchical divides, it conceives of gender and sexuality as ‘empty signifiers’ deployed in political struggles (for hegemony) over notions of civic responsibility, good citizenship and articulations of Europeanness. Similarly, it takes ‘Europeanness’ as an empty signifier, without any essential meaning, arguing that these signifiers are key to understanding recent mobilizations around moral frontiers in Polish politics. Illustrative examples serve to elaborate how LGBT rights and sex education are instrumentalized among self-proclaimed liberals as well as rightwing nationalists, seeking to guarantee the moral integrity of the nation according to an antagonistic logic. On both sides of the political divide, we witness a self-orientalizing positioning towards the European ‘core’, whether phrased in terms of sexual modernity or Christian civilization. publishedVersion

Drawing on an empirical study of gender and sexuality politics in Ukraine, this article interrogates the civilizational and yet unspoken racialization that characterizes Europeanization projects in the context of EU enlargement. Its point of departure is that the boundaries of Europeanness coincide with the boundaries of whiteness in a civilizational frame. It argues that Europeanization involves more than merely the influence of EU policies and values on non-member states, simultaneously marking and unmarking civilizational whiteness. Europeanness is, in this meaning, a quintessential racialized identity marker, even as racial whiteness is unmarked as a ‘natural’ adjacency of the West. This dual mechanism is discussed in terms of racial displacement. More specifically, the article foregrounds how racialized power relations intersect with – while at the same time being obscured by – political instrumentalization of sexual rights and freedoms in ‘transitioning’ processes in Ukraine.

Based on a critical examination of Malmö’s new development strategy, this paper discusses the power of attachment in urban strategy, with a special focus on the ideological framing of social sustainability. It argues that the social sustainability agenda has less to do with its practical purpose of equalizing living conditions in a segregated city and more to do with its ability to mobilize people under a future vision through attachment to a fantasmatic narrative. The fantasmatic construction of the ‘future city’ helps promote ideological closure, but the fantasmatic vision is not tantamount to a utopian ideal that transcends participants’ self-interests. The paper analyzes urban strategists’ communication of visionary planning ideas, such as the idea of social sustainability, as a ritual practice that generates an abstract uniformity through people’s consensual appropriation of schemes. At the same time, the appropriation of schemes affords the participants a space of resistance which could turn the power of attachment into a politics of reattachment that critically engages with—and politicizes—ideological constructs that relate everything to a single vision. Keywords: urban strategy, social sustainability, power of attachment, ideological framing, ritualization

The article explores the way in which trans people represent a cultural ‘difference’ that has to be managed in liberal-democratic societies of today. The point of departure is liberal tolerance discourse, as analysed by Wendy Brown, in which the threatening ‘others’ are being regulated in order to prevent the social order from being destroyed from within. In accordance with liberal norms and values, tolerance promotes individual choice and autonomy: the individual’s freedom of identity. It also assumes, however, that identities, such as trans identity, issue from an essence or inner truth to be found in the person. This subjectivity-constituting contradiction lies at the core of liberal tolerance discourse. Trans people bring into question this contradiction, thereby challenging the foundations of normative subjectivity. The key question that emerges is whether liberal humanist tolerance defies horror and hostility or whether tolerance discourse creates its own gendered and sexualized monsters suitable for late-modern, flexible regimes of governmentality.

In her award‐winning book from 1995, States of Injuries: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity, Wendy Brown examines the relationship between power and freedom from a feminist political‐theoretical p...

Intersectionality is a concept that aims at handling the complexity of social life. It is often presented as a sensitive, and thus accountable, approach to the complexity of life lived in an age of globalization, migration, and displacements of identities, individuals, and groups. This notion of intersectionality presupposes that approaching complexity requires more than the mere adding up of categories like race, class, and gender; it requires an approach presupposing that these categories intersect in mutually constitutive ways in and through socio‐cultural hierarchies and power dimensions that produce complex relations of inclusion, exclusion, domination, and subordination. For feminists, this constructivist approach to identity categories seems promising; on the one hand, intersectionality rejects essentialism and reductionism, on the other hand, the complexity sensitivity of intersectionality maintains the possibility of feminist politics in a complex world, because politics no longer amounts to esse...

I dette nummer er følgnde bøger blevet anmeldt:Nina Javette Koefoed: Besovede kvindfolk og ukærlige barnefædre. Køn, ret og sædelighed i 1700-tallets Danmark. Museum Tusculanums Forlag 2008.Else Trangbæk, Kvindernes Idræt Fra Rødder til Top. Gyldendal 2005.Wendy Brown: Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics. Princeton og Oxford. Princeton University Press, 2005.Birgitte Possing: Uden omsvøb. Et portræt af Bodil Koch. Gyldendal, 2007.Stine Adrian: Nye skabelsesberetninger om æg, sæd og embryoner. Et etnografisk studie af skabelser på sædbanker og fertilitetsklinikker. Linköping Studies in Arts and Science no. 370. Linköping universitet, Tema genus. Linköping 2006.

The Muslim woman wearing the veil, the female anorexic and the from-male-to-female transsexual constitute three different figures that, despite their striking differences, have a common symbolic ground. By focusing on the similarity between the veiled woman and the other two figures, the article sheds a different light on the debate about the Muslim veil in western societies. It is argued that the western notion of woman is based on a structural ambivalence of transcendence and immanence. On the one hand, woman is expected to be liberated, in control and active in public life and in all ways just as free as the man, on the other she represents a deficiency compared to the man; it is expected of her that she takes up a complementary, subordinate position in relation to the man. The subordinate position, however, is seldom pronounced. Officially, the gender hierarchy is not a part of egalitarian societies, that is, the modern configuration that formally rejects a hierarchical worldview. Is this the reason why the three figures are regarded as pathological? Does their way of demonstrating extraordinary transcendence combined with extraordinary immanence make them monstrous?

The relationship between multiculturalism and feminism has been hotly debated both theoretically and politically. This article approaches the issue through a critical assessment of Susan Moller Okins article, "Is multiculturalism bad for women?" (1999) and argues that some forms of feminist critique of multiculturalism run the risk of upholding and strengthening monoculturalism in its most excluding form. Norwegian integration politics are critically evaluated in light of this discussion.